Lawrence Person's Futuramen

In the menagerie of paranormal/imaginary creatures, Shadow People are just that: shadow-like or completely black beings in the shape of people. Some say they’re evil spirits or aliens, others tricks of the imagination, fatigued brains or sleep paralysis nightmares. I mentioned this to a friend, and he said “Oh yeah, I’ve seen those!”

Hell, there’s an entire archive of people to have claimed to see them. Some seem benign or helpful. Others? Not so much. Some seem to wear hats. Then again, people now claim to see Slendarman and Chupacabras, so it hardly proves anything.

There are lots of “shadow people” videos on YouTube and most are painfully fake, obvious superimposition shots, etc. Want an unconvincing compilation video? Of course you do!

Here’s another one, with a couple of repeats, though these seem least slightly less embarrassing than most:

(The guy with the super-haunted house in the last video has his own video channel There’s also a Facebook page debunking it. )

Nothing says “science to benefit humanity” quite like tricking people into thinking that “Shadow People” are in the room with them.

Researchers scanned the brains of 12 people with neurological disorders, who had reported experiencing a ghostly presence.

They found that all of these patients had some kind of damage in the parts of the brain associated with self-awareness, movement and the body’s position in space.

In further tests, the scientists turned to 48 healthy volunteers, who had not previously experienced the paranormal, and devised an experiment to alter the neural signals in these regions of the brain.

They blindfolded the participants, and asked them to manipulate a robot with their hands. As they did this, another robot traced these exact movements on the volunteers’ backs.

When the movements at the front and back of the volunteer’s body took place at exactly the same time, they reported nothing strange.

But when there was a delay between the timing of the movements, one third of the participants reported feeling that there was a ghostly presence in the room, and some reported feeling up to four apparitions were there.

Two of the participants found the sensation so strange, they asked for the experiments to stop.

The researchers say that these strange interactions with the robot are temporarily changing brain function in the regions associated with self-awareness and perception of the body’s position.

The team believes when people sense a ghostly presence, the brain is getting confused: it’s miscalculating the body’s position and identifying it as belonging to someone else.

There are multiple shadow people movies on IMDB, all of which get ratings that range from mediocre to horrible (and the best seems to be a romantic drama that has nothing to do with horror or the supernatural).

Also, here’s a list of possible explanations for shadow people.

(For more creepy paranormal entities, see the post on Black Eyed Kids.)

Pleasant dreams…